Stephen Best is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke University Press, 2018).
Stephen Best
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Writing on Public Books
Code-Switching: An Interview with James Hannaham
Might a stand-up comedian discuss slavery in America with considerable doses of humor? Happens all the time. A contemporary novelist? Not so much. It is the rare writer who is willing to approach the topic without the requisite gravitas. In James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods, a harrowing tale of slave labor in the contemporary United States, […]
Virtual Roundtable on “Empire”
After it debuted last January on Fox, Empire quickly became one of the most talked-about shows on television. Its Shakespearean portrayal of family life, its stylized window onto the hip-hop industry, and its Timbaland-produced soundtrack helped it earn millions of passionate fans (and more than a few critics). To celebrate the premiere of season 2—which […]
